Royalty Report: Scientific & Technical Instruments, Security, Test/Monitoring – Collection: 26564

License Grant

Licensor hereby grants to Licensee the non-exclusive right to use and employ Licensor’s intellectual property rights related to the Products and to manufacture, use and sell the Products in the Licensed Territory.

License Property

Products shall mean Scintillation Crystals, Well Logging Assemblies, Scintillation Crystal late Assemblies and Gamma Camera Plate Assemblies manufactured in accordance with intellectual property rights of Licensor.

“Intellectual property rights” shall mean patents, applications for patents, reissues, renewals, extensions, divisions, and patents of addition relating to the Products.

The technology encompasses a new crystal grower design, new crystal growing processes, and new technology for fabrication of various crystals and sensitive crystal and other products.

Scintillation (to produce a flash of light in a phosphor by striking it) crystals transform the invisible gamma rays into visible flashes of light that can be converted into digital signals for processing.

Field of Use

The applications of the scintillation crystals (often called phosphors) are many and several examples are as given below.

(1) Homeland security uses scintillation detectors and scintillation detector based systems for scanning personnel, vehicles and cargo vessels, ships, for radioactive exposure and radioactive material contents. Border crossings, airports, seaports, and many other points where passengers and cargo are passing through use these systems.

(2) Medical imaging uses scintillation crystals to analyze the radiation emitted from the patients in order to make health related diagnosis. Gamma scanners employ from one to three crystal plates positioned around the patient in order to obtain two dimensional (using one plate) or three dimensional image (using 2 0r 3 plates) of the patients organs examined.

(3) Energy explorations use scintillation crystals to do a real-time analysis of the soil the drill is in and to provide estimates of the oil contents of certain oil rich deposits (when found).

(4) Engine fabricators use scintillation detectors for integrity and the consistency of the engine wall.

(5) Construction industry uses scintillation detectors for real time weld inspections.

License Grant

The first agreement gives licensee exclusive rights  from the government organization to manufacture and distribute a Nonradioactive isotope version of NASA’s low intensity X-ray and gamma ray imaging device (patent no. 4,142,101).  

This technology provides the ability to amplify X-rays that have been converted to visible light.  The FluoroScan System is a low intensity, real time X-ray imaging device which provides high resolution images at radiation levels and at a cost well below those of conventional X-ray and fluoroscopic equipment.  The FluoroScan System technology is based on a micro channel plate image intensifier commonly known as a night vision intensifier.

License Grant

The Licensee has entered into a License Agreement with our Chief Technology Officer and member of our Board of Directors, under which we have acquired exclusive rights to proprietary high technology intellectual properties invented and/or developed by the Licensor, that we will further develop and offer to our customers.

License Property

1 – Perimeter intrusion detection radars
Description
We will develop two radar systems for intrusion detection the first, called more properly GUIDAR is based on ranging leaky coaxial cable sensors and creates a volumetric protection zone; the second is a high performances free-space RADAR and creates a virtual barrier. Both systems are designed to detect moving targets.
The GUIDAR exploits the features of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radar signal transmitted along a leaky coaxial cable and whose reflections, given by targets approaching the cable, are received by another leaky coaxial cable and then processed, detected, and classified by means of a complete and innovative Digital Signal Processing (DSP) system.
The leaky coaxial double cable can be installed, buried or not, along a generic path and protect a cylindrical volume around the double cable with a diameter of about 2 m along its entire length. Each digital processing system, able to detect the position and size of any target, can manage up to hundreds of meters of cable. More digital processing systems can be networked using standard Ethernet and then connected to a central managing system. This technology is generally classified as active, volumetric, terrain following, all-weather, and immune to vegetation and blowing debris.
We also developed a mono-static UWB electronic scanning radar (ESR) using a new antenna design and an advanced DSP system realizing a protection barrier. The processing unit is developed implementing a signal processing scheme able to precisely recognize the intruder radar cross section and position up to hundreds of meters distance from the antenna. More processing units can be networked using standard Ethernet and then connected to a central managing system. This technology is classified as active, volumetric, all-weather, ideal for low profile targets, and immune to vegetation and blowing debris.
Advantages
We will develop innovative cable geometry and innovative antennas that dramatically improve the performances of our systems in terms of ranging with respect to the existing products. Moreover we will adopt innovative UWB radar analysis software based on DSP architecture that permits us to reach very high detection capabilities and performances and to be highly resilient to the environment changes (nuisance).
Applications
These systems are ideal to protect military and operation plants, airports, borders, oil pipes, etc.

2 – EMSEC (protection and eavesdropping)
Description
Electronic equipment can emit unintentional signals from which eavesdroppers may reconstruct processed data at some distance.
We will develop a single pc/laptop active protection system based on the emission of correlated signals (innovative concept) that is intrinsically totally secure. Emitting a composite correlated protection signal the received spectrum is a non discernible mix of the signal to be protected and the protecting signal. This apparatus is low power, narrow band, impossible to violate and easy to be installed.
We will develop a high performances (large distance and through the wall) eavesdropping system on video display unit based on state-of-the-art digital signal processing. The system is an all-digital system implementing a fast AD conversion and digital front-end. Channel equalization, automatic choice of spectral harmonic, automatic extraction of vertical and horizontal synchronizations, and digital image enhancement permit to reach unprecedented performances in terms of readability.
Advantages
A completely and totally new concept is applied to the protection system and a totally digital system will be developed for eavesdropping permitting to reach unprecedented performances.
Application
The protection system can be applied in military installations, in governmental buildings, during tactical operations, etc.

3 – Real time positioning system
Description
Organizations need a system able to locate objects or people. A real time positioning system consists of a fixed infrastructure of base stations and associated hardware and software to enable accurate real-time tracking of small battery powered (active) tags, which can be attached to people or objects, within the area covered by the base stations infrastructure. Compared to Global Positioning Systems (GPS), this system provides greater accuracy (typically to a resolution of a few centimetres) and the ability to work in situations where GPS does not (such as inside buildings) and with very small devices (active tags) with very small batteries.
The sensors in each base station are very sensitive detectors for the low power pulses emitted by the tags and can distinguish between reflections and directly received signals. Each sensor independently determines the azimuth and elevation directions of arrival of the incoming signals using special antenna array and signal analysis. Sensors do not need to have optical line of sight contact with the tags since the signals go through walls and other objects. An infrastructure of base stations can be installed and networked using standard Ethernet and then connected to a central management system.
Advantages
New sensor antennas will be developed with improved performances. Innovative signal processing techniques will improve range and precision. The main advantages of such technologies are high precision, very good performance even in presence of obstacles or limited visibility, capability to work both outdoor and indoor, capability to work also with important metal obstacles using a suitable topology for the base stations, very high noise immunity, etc.
Applications
The system can be applied wherever is necessary to track in real time the position of people or objects, i.e. to associate the data from a bar code scanner with its position in a warehouse, to provide the position of a pallet of goods placed in a warehouse or a container in a storage area or airport, to automatically detect the proximity between objects, to determine if during an emergency procedure employees have all reached designated areas, etc.

4 – Image processing codecs
Description
This system is constituted of an off-the-shelf electronic board based on digital signal processors running state-of-the-art image processing software algorithms (embedded system). It gets an input from any video camera (or radar, or eavesdropping system) and gives alarm and other outputs. It will perform the following content video analyses motion detection, abandoned/removed object/vehicle detection, perimeter crossing detection, panic situation detection, people/vehicle counting and speed evaluation, PTZ camera tracking, plate recognition, behaviour analysis, face recognition.
Advantages
We are confident to reach incredible performances in terms of image resolution (> 1 mega-pixel) and video rate (> 25 frames per second).
Applications
The system is ideal to protect military and operation plants, airports, borders, vip houses, highways, cities, etc.

Field of Use

Licensee has the right to file patents on these technologies in the field of intrusion detection systems, radar systems for border and pipeline surveillance, and technologies for monitoring and surveillance systems, through our License Agreement with the Licensor.

License Grant

Licensor hereby grants to Licensee a non-exclusive, personal, non- transferable right and license in the Licensed Patent to make, have made, use and sell or otherwise dispose of Licensed Products.

License Property

Licensor is the parent company of the owner of the entire right, title and interest in United States Patent 4,366,382 entitled 'X-ray Line Scan System for use in Baggage Inspection' (the Licensed Patent) and has the right to make this license.